Making New Plants: A History

This lecture examines the work of Hugo de Vries, a Dutch botanist who was one of the first to claim that science would allow plants and animals to be designed to order.

It also looks at the early twentieth-century ‘Station for Experimental Evolution’ in New York, and at the utopian vision of Charlotte Gilman Perkins’ Herland (1915), a novel describing a lost world populated by women that took the form of a perfect garden, whose wonderful plants and lack of men were both explained by de Vries’ theory of mutation.